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Music

The Internet Made Me Hate All My Favorite Artists

Social media made me pissed off at Pharrell and guilty about listening to The Shins.
Ryan Bassil
London, GB

Social media makes it incredibly easy to hate everyone. You start to dislike people on Facebook because they’re successful, and you’re sitting and cold-sweating in three-day-old pants. It can be hard to stomach another self-congratulatory tweet from a colleague when you’re pacifying hernia-inducing stress-levels. Fuck her and everything she Pinterests.

This is OK. Misanthropy is healthy. If we didn't feel at least some disdain for our friends, we'd be awful, acting like phony overly-familiar estate agents. But while it’s OK to learn to hate people you once liked (shout out anyone who’s ever been in a relationship) it’s becoming increasingly apparent that social media can also ruin the music we listen to.

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Point one.

It used to be the case—back when a wall was made out of bricks, not your ex-boyfriend’s holiday photos—that if you liked an artist you would buy tickets to their shows and have a tower-stack of their CDs in your bedroom ready to impress anyone unlucky enough to end up there. Now, of course, you can now project the music you want to associate with upon everyone—regardless of whether or not you’ve coaxed them back to your place for an evening of disappointment. In some ways, this is great—a tastemaker you trust is like having a partner who consistently provides for you—but it can also make us incredibly precious with what we choose to share.

The other day I went on iTunes and stumbled across loads of music that hadn’t been listened to in years. Stuff like Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, Wilco, and the Moldy Peaches. It struck me that I hadn’t listened to these artists mostly by choice but also because it felt like I’d been conditioned to no longer enjoy their music. Instead of their albums just being records that came out ten years ago, they became nostalgia I could only listen to with an uncomfortable grin. Is this my fault? Have I become so sentimental that everything, even music, is little more than tearful reminiscing? Nah. The blame lies with the internet. The internet’s reaction to that sort of music is best described by Summer Roberts in The OC: “Death Cab, isn’t that just one guitar and a whole lot of whining?”

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I started to think about why I hadn’t listened to those records in so long—and, sure, you can cast it off as growing up and tastes changing or whatever—but I’m pretty sure it comes down to the way music exists on the web.

There came a point where my news feed began to fill with bands I didn’t recognize, genres I hadn’t heard, and year-end lists with albums I couldn’t recall. That helped me develop as a music fan and get a job writing about music. Things change, new sounds arrive, you keep learning. But the omnipresent search for the current means that it’s easy to feel left behind. You forget that other music fans, journalists, and friends have their own personal back catalogs, the bands whose CDs are gathering dust in an Ikea plastic container somewhere. On the surface it seems like people only listen to the things they share online. I started to question my own taste, and, somewhere along the line, I subconsciously started to dislike the songwriters I had grown up listening to, believing they were boring next to new music. So I stopped listening.

The influence of others on the way we view music is an important one. The discussion on social media can also make it easier to dislike certain artists. Point two: Look at Taylor Swift’s video, “Anaconda,” or whatever the fuck Iggy and J-Lo were going for on “Booty.” Ten years ago you would maybe discuss music in the playground or over the water cooler, debate whether it was terrible or the best thing ever, and move on. These days you can guess the thinkpieces before the videos have played out. You start to dislike Iggy Azalea even if you’ve never heard one of her songs; your opinion forms from the people on your timeline who have taken a dump on her career before you’ve even attempted getting out of bed.

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The sheer amount of information we assimilate on a daily basis means it’s difficult to stop other’s thoughts from appearing in your subconscious. Subliminally we become attracted to certain artists—and equally repulsed by others—because we’re guided by the rants of others and the thinkpieces that can change the context of how we view music.

If you read a piece that attempts a deeper reading of a song—like why it’s ridiculous that Iggy Azalea uses an American accent or something about how rap music is misogynistic—and you begin to tailor your opinion. Obviously music should be held up to rigorous critique, and artists shouldn't be able to get away with inauthenticity or sexism just because people aren't paying attention. But the flipside is things that were enjoyable on face value can become something entirely different, sometimes in a negative way. It's made me question every rap song I've enjoyed and prompted a mild dislike toward Pharrell for working with Robin Thicke. As a result, you no longer want to listen to a song 15 times in a row because there are newfound implications: that it’s heavily derivative of the past, that someone already did it better, that you’re a dumbass for not understanding its political implication.

It’s important to write and think about music; understanding something is often the most rewarding part of being a music fan. But when so many opinions are forced into every corner, it can be difficult to come to terms with your own thoughts. You end up being ambivalent toward an artist because it’s easier than confessing to liking them and potentially being shot down.

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And then, point three: For every great thing social media has achieved (brand meltdowns, @CoffeeDad, Cher’s Twitter account), come more reasons to dislike your favorite artist: the heavy ratio of retweets (look at any rapper's timeline), the dumbass opinions musicians hold (see above picture from Snoop Dogg), the shilling for dumb products they've endorsed. For some, social media is a blessing. For others it takes away any semblance of the reasons why teenagers fall in love with musicians in the first place. The artist is not a supreme being; the artist is a 23 year old with a phone contract and an inability to avoid retweeting every compliment.

None of this is inherently terrible. I like reading clickbait news (did you see the story about that bloke from Kasabian running over his dad?), as touched upon earlier it’s always interesting to discuss music, and, damn, the amount of music discovered through benevolent souls on the internet is unparalleled. So thank you. But the way that content exists and is shared online can explain a little into why our listening habits have changed, why we’re so anachronistic with our music taste, jumping from Taylor Swift to The Square to SOPHIE.

We've been opened up to an even wider soundscape—a world where music websites will cover everything from Rich Gang to Sun Kil Moon to Deafheaven to Thundercat—and it's an incredibly great and amazing thing. We have discussion everywhere. But equally this has made it easier to forget about musical pasts, to become overwhelmed to the point that it's easier to shrug off certain artists or dislike them altogether.

These three things—unrestricted personas, the ramification of public discourse, and insecurities that stemmed from the speed of the internet—that make me think differently about artists I used to love. This can be difficult, and I'm an idiot for writing this piece, because everyday I slump into work and become part of the problem. I make artists look like dickheads, push certain ideas and theorize narratives behind songs, and tweet endlessly about music I'm hyped about. But as a music fan, and not a writer, the internet is something that's having an effect on my listening habits. Basically: Excuse me while I take a time out and listen to "Caring is Creepy" and enjoy it and forget about everything else that's happening and forget about everything I should be thinking about what's happening.

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